{"id":151,"date":"2006-04-21T02:54:38","date_gmt":"2006-04-21T06:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/2006\/04\/21\/a-revelation\/"},"modified":"2006-04-27T16:11:13","modified_gmt":"2006-04-27T20:11:13","slug":"a-revelation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/2006\/04\/21\/a-revelation\/","title":{"rendered":"A Revelation."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"a169\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Disclaimer:<\/strong> This post will be about as funny as the last and even more self-indulgent.<\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t sleep. But moments ago I nearly nodded off. During that in-between-dream-and-wakeful-worlds time I suddenly simplified a solution to my blockmate Verena&#8217;s QFT homework. She had to verify some result about the Lorentz group &#8212; at least I thought I had. So I jumped up, ran to the computer, and wrote a technically inclined email to her about SL(2,<strong>C<\/strong>), a group of manifold importance to mathematicians and physicists alike. Satisfied, I went back to bed only to realize, again while nodding off, that I was wrong. What I wrote applied not to the special linear group but to the projective special linear group, PSL(2,<strong>C<\/strong>).<\/p>\n<p>Neither of those emails contained the revelation mentioned in the title. No, it is this: if I think about this stuff to ease myself to sleep, maybe I do, indeed, want to be a mathematician when I grow up, at least for a little bit. Anyway, now you and I both have something to contemplate before bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Disclaimer: This post will be about as funny as the last and even more self-indulgent. I can&#8217;t sleep. But moments ago I nearly nodded off. During that in-between-dream-and-wakeful-worlds time I suddenly simplified a solution to my blockmate Verena&#8217;s QFT homework. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/2006\/04\/21\/a-revelation\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jreyes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}